Best IRC clients for Cat5.tv chat-room?

Just curious what other viewers consider the best IRC clients to use for the Cat5 chat-room. The web based IRC client offered by Freenode (the one that the Cat5 website links to) certainly offers an easy way to get into the chat room, but the chat features are somewhat limited.

There are a lot of multi-protocol IM clients that support IRC, and a few IRC specific ones. I'm curious what others are using, and what are the key features that make your choice attractive to you. Pidgin is open source which makes it very attractive, but is Pidgin the hands down winner? or are there others with key features that Pidgin lacks?

I am not a heavy IM user so I don't stay current on the alternatives for IM clients. I'd appreciate the insights of other viewers.

I use Xchat fulltime, but I am in multiple servers and rooms by default. Really, the "best" depends on your usecase and needs.

Xchat
Pidgin
irssi (command line based)
VisualChat (I think it is called) for Windows is a good one.

There are just four I can think of off the top of my head (which hurts at the time of writing.) I would stay away from programs like Empathy, which use the protocols but do not adhear to the standards. I can for instance say " /me does something " in xchat and it will be executed as a proper command, but within Empathy that may not be the case. (/me is a bad example, everything supports it. But there are other useful commands empathy does not support.) So whatever you do, make sure that it at least try's to adhear to standards.

P.S. this may be edited at a later time to not sound so horrible once this headace is gone.